I've seen boilerplate be brought up as an argument very frequently and I keep wondering, what sort of boilerplate do you deal with that it is a considerable time sink? I feel like most languages and frontend frameworks have a pretty established template project which gets you going as far as boilerplate goes. When it comes to backend it's more of the same. When it comes to gamedev, you have established game engines which cut down on the boilerplate process. If you are writing your own engine in something like Vulkan which require a lot of pre-game ritual, there are still plenty of template projects to get you started, but they are more surface level than the frontend/backend examples due to the nature of the project. If you are working on popular hardware, like arduinos, esp32s, there are established template projects for most languages. And if you are working on a niche language or framework for which this doesn't apply, then roughly by the second project in them you'll find yourself just copying over the boilerplate from the first.

So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?

I think that's half true because there is a lot of great technology that exists today where you can get anything done without any of the boilerplate. A very brief example is the .NET ecosystem where I get a lot of work done in asp.net and winforms in a pleasant way.

Bad example. Even the prompt for that would be longer than the code itself.